Fewer people are using Elon Musk's X, according to analysts | Hacker News Reader

Fewer people are using Elon Musk's X, according to analysts

nbcnews.com

16 pointshotdailys11 comments

But it appears that Elon and supporters don't care. They have their bubble and they are happy. It's a matter of who and how many are willing to pay for the bubble.

That math has been done. Unless Elon gets wildly higher subscription rates than any other social media, and much faster, subscriptions will not save Xitter.

But you see, if you instead measure using [random newly-defined metric], it appears that the numbers are higher than ever before! Checkmate, haters!

I started an X account recently and the posts they put into my feed were the most intensely negative tweets and imagery I've ever seen interspersed with sports shit I also could not block. It didn't matter how many times I tried to block a certain kind of content another account posting the exact same thing would be in the feed. I didn't want to see basketball, Hitlerism, political tweets or Gaza gore yet that is all I was shown. I deactivated my account and checked out mastodon instead and the signup screen for that was blatantly censorious and would be like using twitter with annoying leftists instead. Where the hell do normal people hang out online to have a chat?

Imagining the kind of stuff swirling around the average twitter/mastodon users head is unreal. There must be radicalism beyond measure just beneath the surface ready to blow for every sort of group all across the world.

There is no "signup screen" for "Mastodon." It isn't a centralized platform like Twitter. You choose to follow specific instances or people - and normal people have political views (such as all of the politics in your comment, here.) If you don't want politics, don't follow politics, simple as. Unlike with Twitter, blocking actually works in the fediverse.

But honestly, if seeing one signup form was all it took to send you on a tilt about censorship and radical leftists? Stay on Twitter.

This is what I was referring to in regards to a signup: https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up

By the way I would hardly characterise myself as being 'on a tilt' in my post, I simply stated that mastodon was x.com but for the other side. Perhaps you are on a tilt and anyone level-headed appears as tilted?

I wonder if there's an AI product/startup idea here. A personal AI firewall that aggressively curates social media content and only shows you content that benefits you (posts that are information dense, curious, and not angry), instead of benefiting the corporation or benefiting someone's ideological agenda by keeping you doomscrolling.

Anyways, I've been moderately happy with Bluesky. It's got an obvious left-bias (probably just due to a flight of left-leaning people from X), but it doesn't have racism, gore, porn, so I don't go away feeling down like I do after using X.

I think this shows you just fundamentally misunderstood how Mastodon works. (Which, admittedly, is pretty common, since the onboarding is terrible.)

Those rules are all for mastodon.social, which is a specific server running the Mastodon Twitter-Like software. There exist countless other servers with their own sets of rules (one of which may be more to your liking) that you could join. No matter which server you join, you can generally interact (follow, reply, etc) with people on other servers.

… Wait, what upset you there? Twitter has nearly all of those rules; it’s just become extremely bad at enforcing them.

Censorship is when no hate speech and gore

But they also complain about having to see hitlerisms and gore??? Like do you want to see the child with half a head or not, I’m so confused.

Maybe they are just laboring under the misapprehension that you can somehow compartmentalize the two on the same platform and not inherently attract Nazis/gore-enthusiasts to your new gorehost/onlygore social media.

> the signup screen for that was blatantly censorious

That’s how you keep out Basketball Hitler.

But more seriously, there are thousands of Mastodon instances, with different rules.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com